I recently had this happen to me but it was my SO (or former, since we haven’t been together since last July). I was also in bed and thought he was standing at the doorway calling my name. I don’t recall seeing him so much as knowing he was there by the sound of his voice.
He’s not dead, to clarify.
It frightened me because despite a complete non-belief in ghosts or a spiritual world it seemed VERY real, and the worst part is with him being in ICE detention I can’t call him so I had to wait a week to hear his voice so I’d know he wasn’t dead and I hadn’t experienced a ghostly appearance. It affected me that strongly.
So I’m guessing hallucination? I told my therapist about it and she says it’s actually quite common when you’re experiencing the heavy stress I’ve been going through.
For me, there is a distinction to be made between an “action-memory” or a “dream-like memory” and the emotional experience of specifically NOT knowing if it’s real–if only in the moment.
For me, that’s part of the hallucination (although the word hallucination doesn’t seem to fit quite right).
In the anecdote I mentioned earlier, I didn’t “dream” the doorbell was ringing; I “dreamt” the doorbell was ringing and that I needed to get up to go answer it and when I realized it wasn’t the right sound for my doorbell I experienced a moment of “irreality”–a sense that I couldn’t tell which was real and which was the “dream.”
[QUOTE=mishagoe]
…Except of course the brain’s representation of the world is in the world, so by definition is real at least as far as the physical neural activations of the brain network, irrespective of the content, i.e. the subjective mental experience.
So you must at minimum be saying there is an aspect to mental experience that while grounded and correlated in the physicallity of the brain, is for all intends and purposes, interchangeable and non-speciifc and can be correlated with any other substitutable sujective mental experience. In other words, there is an aspect to reality that is wholly subjective and cannot be specifically linked to an objective phenomenon.
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Wrong. We can scan brains of people having hallucinations, which provides evidence of objective phenomena. What we can’t do is measure the output of individual firing neurons in a way which would give us a look into what exactly the person is experiencing while hallucinating, or explain why. But that doesn’t make it not any less a physical phenomenon, just one that is beyond our ability to measure.
Accepting the fact that there are things our brains do that we can’t now measure and may never be able to measure is pretty far away from saying “Hmm, maybe ghosts exist.”
Yes. The rest of us are hallucinating the ongoing discussion.
Forgot to add my own experience - I have tinnitus, and if I have to pull over for an emergency vehicle with sirens blaring, when I continue, I hear distant sirens long after it’s gone. My brain reinterprets my usual ear-ringing as sirens; it’s very convincing. I usually roll down the windows to listen in case another vehicle actually is coming, and the change in ambient sound will shake off the illusion.
Kinda similar to this, on long car journeys as a child, I used to listen to the rumbling, buzzing road noise of the car and think of a song (any piece of music) - after a short while, I would hear the music picking itself out from the noise.
I missed this earlier, but no, that’s not what the OP is reporting. The OP is reporting hearing a noise. He’s not saying with any certainty that it was the spirit of his father. He does say it sounded like his father saying his name. But as I said, you don’t get to rewrite the meaning of parsimony based on the conclusion you want. Even if the OP was fairly sure of what he’d heard, it wouldn’t be simpler explanation.
Yes I know we can map neural activation patterns and overal functional activation states and correlate them to the individual thinking about something, remembering something, looking at something and getting ready to act in some way. In short we can create an image of the brain and say, this is the point the subject did this or thought about that.
My point is not about that, it is about this logical error in all these counter arguments: by equating the neural activation pattern of subject hearing a dead relative speaking in the next room with subject hearing the neighbor talking loudly next door, to explain why subject couldn’t possibly be experiencing a “non-real” event such as a ghost/spirit/soul, by insisting it must have been this other “real” event, you have substituted one mental content for another, calling them one and the same since by definition they must both correlate to the exact same neural activation state, i.e. the original experience reported by the subject. I don’t think you can do that without also assuming that mental content is essentially substituable for any given neural activation pattern. In other words, the content is not specifically related to the the specific physical state of the brain, otherwise you could not substitute content in the way these explanations do. I.e. you must belief mental content and physical brain state are not connected, this is the mind/body duality. If you believe that why can’t you believe in ghosts. You might as well.
Once again, before we consider ghosts as a possibility, we should find out if ghosts are a possibility equal with the other possibilities mentioned before. Here is direct evidence via You Tube of cat ventriloquism, which makes it a possibility to be considered. Where is your corresponding direct evidence for the existence of ghosts?
I don’t quite understand why you insist I’m trying to rewrite the meaning of parsimony, possibly I am, I don’t think I am, or it may just be beyond me and you are running circles around me logically. I just think we need to be careful how tenaciously we debunk the content of personal experience. I’d like to leave the door open to the possibility that yes, things may go bump in the night. It seems though that generally the immediate reaction is to go for the “hallucination” explanation. Personal experience is everything we have in this world, it is out sole connection to the world, and it is extremely powerful, and has helped us function successfully for a few hundred thousand years and longer. I’m inclined to give subjective personal experience the benefit of the doubt.
With respect to the OP, I addressed it from a philosophical standpoint. However, I have had a couple of experiences that are relevant, I’ll write them up later today. I’m sure they’ll be explained away as well.
A pile of nonsense and sophistry does not add up to evidence or a logical argument no matter how big the pile gets. Nobody has claimed that “mental content and physical brain state are not connected.” The contention is that we don’t always accurately perceive the world around us: you think you experienced something, but that doesn’t mean what happened to you is exactly what you think it was. Our brains are prone to all sorts of errors.
Please read and at least try to understand what I’m saying or if you can’t be bothered to do that, then feel free to skip any of my posts. Thanks in advance.
Excuse me, I though this was a forum for thoughful discussion, but if what I’m saying is simply a big pile, then I’ll just stop depositing them for you. Feel free to agree to amongst yourselves.
There’s good reason for that. You know, logic and stuff. In the process of inquiry, you don’t get to say “stop trying to debunk that, it might be magic.”
We’ve developed things like the scientific method because, while personal experience has been good enough for the species to survive, it’s not a particularly reliable guide to the world in a lot of ways. It emphasizes snap judgments and tangential connections, and the general priority is keeping you alive and uneaten by predators, not making sure you have a proper understanding of phenomena.
I’ve read and understood your posts(small side note: What is it with some people that think that the only reason people disagree with them is because they just don’t understand what is being put forth?)
You want ghosts to be considered a possibility, and I am asking you for evidence that ghosts should even be considered, beyond the fact that you can type the word “ghosts”. I have shown you direct evidence that ventriloquist cats should be considered, and I have asked you to do the same for ghosts.
Note to moderators-this isn’t a “joke” response. I really want to know why my example, for which there is just a little evidence, should be discarded when there is no evidence for the existence of ghosts.
I would take that further and say we never accurately perceive the world around us. We’re incapable of perceiving some of it, and for the rest we’re designed (in the schematic, functional sense) to only perceive it in an approximate and digested form.
We’ve developed the scientific method about as much as we’ve developed language. It’s simply how we function coming into this world. It is part of what we are, science, language, art, religion, etc, it’s all one package and all there because it’s how we function best, not because in our wisdom we developed it. Good luck taking it apart and discarding the inconvenient bits.